… I suppose I’d have to grudgingly accept that perhaps Philip Mountbatten could not be entirely responsible for something he did when only a teenager but it does make food for though, doesn’t it? Funny how popular this family is, the British royal family, and how well they hide their Nazi connections…
… time for something completely different… can you name who is in this picture:
Look Familiar?
Posted in Republicanism
Having been homeless myself several times, I speak from experience on the topic. I don’t think a few days wild camping and bivouacing whilst an undergraduate counts but 54 addresses in a 19 year span and a later period, lasting several months when I frequently slept rough, with nowhere to call home definitely does. Whichever path homeless starts off on it always includes insecurity.
Politics By Headlines
Westminster Council recently made political waves by threatening to criminalise those who would feed the homeless. A modern day Jesus would fall foul in their regime. Across the land, the thieving Tory bastards have a burning contempt for the propertyless. Their political ideology is simple:
Ooh I'm Scared!
Here in Brighton & Hove the local fiscal fundamentalists have launched their fiercest attack yet on the growing Green movement. Their City councillors urge newspapers to report that they would like the homeless to move into wards that elected members of the Green Party to represent them. This shameless politicking would be akin to ghetto creationism, if there was any possibility of it working. It isn’t a real policy. It is just scaremongering. The thieving Tory bastards and their supporters are, as Billy Bragg put it many years ago, the people who own the newspapers and own this land:
Sphincter Tightening Choices
The Evening Anus (Argus) slurps up this bile without any attempt at critical analysis. The less well informed are pumped stories about travellers gleefully leaving their bases in Essex and flocking to Brighton & Hove. The facts are being ignored:
The good folk of Brighton & Hove elected Green Party councillors because they wanted something radically different from the other parties. Now we’ve got something very different. We pose questions which the rest of the country would rather forget. We say that we will treat the homeless differently from councils run by thieving Tory bastards. We want to help the homeless instead of pushing them away. If other places acted as we do, travellers wouldn’t rush over there either because by that time there would be adequate provision for travellers and other types of homeless people everywhere.
Romantic View If By Choice
Being homeless is tough. Squatting doesn’t make it suddenly easier. I’ve squatted in brick buildings. Trust me, there is an absolute scale and having a roof over your head is better than just the stars. Even a railway arch or a shop door frame is better than just the stars. You can only admire the heavens when you’ve a cosy retreat from them. There isn’t a pinchable difference between being a rough sleeper in London and a fellow sleeping in someone else’s caravan on squatted land in Sussex.
Local politics needs to address the bigger issues. Our political system has broken down though. The old style managerial parties chase each other around in increasingly smaller circles in the pursuit of a very small number of floating voters in certain marginal constituencies. They pay lip service to the rest of us. Brighton & Hove’s politics has risen above this nonsense. Our politics pose a question for the rest of the country. What do you want politicians to do? Do you want them to pursue futile ambitions and economic guessing games? If so, you can vote Labour, Liberal or for the thieving Tory bastards. Brighton & Hove’s Green voters have challenged the nation’s Establishment to answer some bigger questions. Green policies are now being attacked furiously by the Establishment’s old media fortress. Ask yourself, how many times has the Daily Mail campaigned for you and how many times against? Which side are you on? This attack on our Green sanctuary on the coast doesn’t stop to check facts or to critically analyse the strength of an argument, it just blunders on and on. To win more support locally, we Greens need to tackle this blunderbus head on. The local rag, the Evening Anus, isn’t worth wiping our arses on, but it is still read. It is read by increasingly few people and its days are numbered but it is still read. We have hundreds of members locally. Our party needs to mobilise the inactive membership into counterattacking. Deluging the Evening Anus with critical emails would be a good start. The attack needs to be directed at the Anus itself, deploring its poor quality journalism on the issue of homelessness. It needs to understand that simply reporting scaremongering doesn’t count as journalism.
